Re: Conflict detection for update_deleted in logical replication

On Sun, Jan 12, 2025 at 10:36 PM Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2025 at 6:13 AM Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 3. If the apply worker cannot catch up, it could enter to a bad loop;
> > the publisher sends huge amount of data -> the apply worker cannot
> > catch up -> it needs to wait for a longer time to advance its
> > oldest_nonremovable_xid -> more garbage are accumulated and then have
> > the apply more slow -> (looping). I'm not sure how to deal with this
> > point TBH. We might be able to avoid entering this bad loop once we
> > resolve the other two points.
> >
>
> I don't think we can avoid accumulating garbage especially when the
> workload on the publisher is more. Consider the current case being
> discussed, on the publisher, we have 30 clients performing read-write
> operations and there is only one pair of reader (walsender) and writer
> (apply_worker) to perform all those write operations on the
> subscriber. It can never match the speed and the subscriber side is
> bound to have less performance (or accumulate more bloat) irrespective
> of its workload. If there is one client on the publisher performing
> operation, we won't see much degradation but as the number of clients
> increases, the performance degradation (and bloat) will keep on
> increasing.
>
> There are other scenarios that can lead to the same situation, such as
> a large table sync, the subscriber node being down for sometime, etc.
> Basically, any case where apply_side lags by a large amount from the
> remote node.
>
> One idea to prevent the performance degradation or bloat increase is
> to invalidate the slot, once we notice that subscriber lags (in terms
> of WAL apply) behind the publisher by a certain threshold. Say we have
> max_lag (or max_lag_behind_remote) (defined in terms of seconds)
> subscription option which allows us to stop calculating
> oldest_nonremovable_xid for that subscription. We can indicate that
> via some worker_level parameter. Once all the subscriptions on a node
> that has enabled retain_conflict_info have stopped calculating
> oldest_nonremovable_xid, we can invalidate the slot. Now, users can
> check this and need to disable/enable retain_conflict_info to again
> start retaining the required information. The other way could be that
> instead of invalidating the slot, we directly drop/re-create the slot
> or increase its xmin. If we choose to advance the slot automatically
> without user intervention, we need to let users know via LOG and or
> via information in the view.
>
> I think such a mechanism via the new option max_lag will address your
> concern: "It's reasonable behavior for this approach but it might not
> be a reasonable outcome for users if they could be affected by such a
> performance dip without no way to avoid it." as it will provide a way
> to avoid performance dip only when there is a possibility of such a
> dip.
>
> I mentioned max_lag as a subscription option instead of a GUC because
> it applies only to subscriptions that have enabled
> retain_conflict_info but we can consider it to be a GUC if you and
> others think so provided the above proposal sounds reasonable. Also,
> max_lag could be defined in terms of LSN as well but I think time
> would be easy to configure.
>
> Thoughts?

I agree that we cannot avoid accumulating dead tuples when the
workload on the publisher is more, and which affects the subscriber
performance. What we need to do is to update slot's xmin as quickly as
possible to minimize the dead tuple accumulation at least when the
subscriber is not much behind. If there is a tradeoff for doing so
(e.g., vs. the publisher performance), we need to provide a way for
users to balance it.  The max_lag idea sounds interesting for the case
where the subscriber is much behind. Probably we can visit this idea
as a new feature after completing this feature.

Regards,

-- 
Masahiko Sawada
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com